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'Coins handsome as Nero's; of good substance and weight. Offa Rex resonant in silver, and the names of his moneyers. They struck with accountable tact. They could alter the king's face.' So does the poet Geoffrey Hill in his Mercian Hymns, having memorably hailed Offa as 'overlord of the M5', describe his coinage (xi). These lines capture something of the essence of this spectacular coinage: its beauty, fineness, variety and the complexities of its minting. The Coinage of Offa and His Contemporaries, a handsomely produced and illustrated volume, manages to do the same - and much more. The audiences this work addresses are wide, and range from numismatists to historians, including economic historians and art historians, and from archaeologists to linguists.
The genesis of this volume is complex: at its core are the data gathered over several decades by Derek Chick, an expert coin conservator and keen numismatist with a particular interest in Offa's coinage. Because of his work, Chick was in touch with coin dealers and metal-detector users and quickly gained their confidence, so that he was among the first to hear of new finds and confidential details of findspots. He collected these data meticulously, weights and measurements together with images and plaster casts, and was generous in sharing information with other scholars and prompt in reporting finds. Chick became a well-respected authority on the period, publishing and giving papers on Offa's coins...